Posts Tagged: cancer patients with effective treatments

With nearly 40% of adults in the US being diagnosed with cancer within their lifetime, it is not surprise that a large number of people know someone who has battled against the terrible disease. However, thanks to the staggering progress being made by companies like Tempus, the future is hopeful and looking brighter. Co-founded by Eric Lefkofsky, also a co-founder of Groupon, Tempus is leading the data-enabled precision medicine movement today.

The healthcare industry faces a problem. It’s technology and systems are not up-to-date with the technology available today. Eric learned about this disparity that exists between data collection and digital technology when his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. Despite all the data available to doctors, there had never before been an efficient way to organize and effectively use it.

Tempus’ mission, however, is to revolutionize the way cancer care is currently delivered. While developing a platform that analyzes a patients data, they have had to face and overcome certain hurdles such as obtaining inexpensive clinical and medical data, as well as the fact that essential patient information was stored as free text fields in physician notes. These are difficult to capture and analyze, so Tempus created software that can process natural language and characters and transform this information into structured data ready to be utilized in advanced cancer treatment.

Eric Lefkosky and other leaders in data enabled precision medicine are confident that through technologies like the Tempus platform, doctors will have the ability to more accurately match cancer patients with effective treatments. Eric’s road to becoming a Tempus co-founder has not been ordinary. Born on September 1969 in Southfield, Michigan, Lefkofsky has contributed more in less than his 50 years than most do in a lifetime. Throughout his career, he has taught at DePaul University’s Kellstadt Graduate School of Management.

Currently Lefkosky now works as an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth of Business. Hoping to one day cure cancer, he is also heavily involved philanthropically, regularly contributing financially to the cause. Eric Lefkosky believes that today’s scientific breakthroughs will one day have a worthwhile effect on the lives of cancer patients, as well as other conditions.